Editorial: Neither Justice nor Crime
(We are all Criminals Now)

We have entered a period in which it must finally be recognized
and admitted that criminal justice systems in Western liberal
democracies are neither, in any real or meaningful way, about
justice nor, even, about crime.

While it has perhaps long been recognized, at least by those
subjected to its numerous inequities and biases and excesses
(among critical theorists and certainly among the oppressed) that
criminal justice is not about justice (this awareness represented
in oppositional voices, particularly by poor and racialized
communities that speak of "injustice system" or notions of "just
us"), it is a more recently glimpsed (perhaps only partly) reality
that criminal justice systems are not now (if ever) directed at
addressing (in some vague way, never mind stopping)
crime. They do not even live up to that minimal claim to
legitimation.

This emerging awareness is based in the recognition that most
criminal justice system activity is not even taken up with dealing
with actual crimes (let alone social harms), except in the minimal
degree necessary to maintain some legitimizing capacities. Rather,
most criminal justice system activity is involved in two areas:
first, in dealing with administration and administrative breaches;
and second, in surveillance and punishment of people not engaged
in criminal activity.

As Aiyanas Ormond, in this issue, points out, approximately 21
percent of criminal justice system activity is directed toward
administrative offenses in the Canadian context. These include
failures to appear, missed meetings, unpaid fines, etc. rather
than actual "crimes" (associated with any social harms). Ormond
suggests that the system is driven by a class-based process of
"crime mining" in which low level, or entirely harmless
occurrences, typically survival strategies of the poor, are
increasingly criminalized or illegalized, brought within the
system for processing as a means for keeping public funds
circulating into the system agencies and institutions at a time
when actual crime rates are dropping.

Even more dramatically, and perhaps foreboding (and more
disturbing for the middle strata and more comfortable) is the fact
that much of the system's resources are directed at the
surveillance, criminalization and punishment of people who
have committed no crime. This includes the broad range of
criminalizing practices deployed against protesters and others
caught up on the streets during protest events-people who are
arrested and detained simply because they are present in areas
(where they might live or have jobs) that the state is securing
for global economic and political elites (as at meetings of the G8
and G20 or World Trade Organization, etc.).

In Toronto during the G20 meetings of 2010, for example, around
1300 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in Canadian
history, and detained throughout the G20 meeting period-despite
having done nothing wrong (reflected in the fact that almost all
were released without charge after the meetings concluded). Many
were not even protesters-quite a few were workers simply heading
to or from their jobs. A large proportion of detainees were
arrested through so-called kettling practices in which police trap
crowds in alleyways or side streets (regardless of what
individuals in the crowd were doing beforehand) and refuse to let
them leave. In these cases everyone on a street is viewed as,
treated, as, rendered, a criminal. They are all made illegal. Even
where they have done nothing to cause concern or harm.

Beyond this are the variety of associational laws generated over
the last two decades that criminalize people, again not for any
actions they have engaged in, simply for having some sort of,
often tenuous, vague, or meaningless "connection" or "association"
with a group or collective that the state dislikes. In Canada,
well before the 9/11 attacks provided the statist justification
for all manner of egregious laws, the government of the day passed
anti-gang legislation that allowed the state to arrest, detain,
and charge people, as well as seizing their assets, if they had
some gang association. Typically the law served only to target
rather low level participants. It was not long before the Chief of
Police in Toronto (now a federal government minister) attempted to
have an anti-poverty group known for direct action politics, the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, declared a gang, members
arrested, office resources seized. While the Chief was thwarted in
that effort, after 9/11 the anti-terror laws passed almost
immediately afterward extended the associational legislation for
use against people having, again vague, association with supposed
terrorist groups. Incredibly, evidence of association in these
cases can consist of a little as wearing a patch with a terror
group symbol on your clothing or selling a newspaper from a
labeled group.

These associational policies represent a significant dismantling
of central aspects of liberal democratic legal systems. They do
away with foundations of due process: disclosure of evidence,
assumptions of innocence. In cases like security certificates,
legal instruments in Canada that allow the state to arrest and
detain people without cause, for unlimited periods, without
evidence, and without public hearings, even habeas corpus
is jeopardized. Such legislation renders criminological staples of
actus rea and mens rea entirely meaningless.

While the state focus on activists-organizers, protesters, and
any oppositional forces-is not new (and forms a large part of the
basis for state formation in capitalist liberal democracies), what
is a significant recent development is that state control
practices, as in NSA spying or surveillance activities for
example, are now directed at regular folks-at everyone, even the
citizens who most accept state claims to criminal justice
legitimacy.

Criminologists, rather than posing as mere analysts of criminal
justice systems who, even as critics, accept that, even if they
cannot dispense justice, they at least deal with crime, (while
perhaps offering suggestions for improvement or questioning the
relationship to justice along the way), must take up the new
pressing task of shifting the focus and foundation of the
discipline.

We must stop pursuing the study of a chimera-of something that
does not exist (or else move our discipline to the realm of mythic
studies or fantasy). We certainly must toss aside our
taken-for-granted assumptions about the discipline's central
organizational object of study. If the criminal justice system is
involved neither in addressing crime nor in securing justice, what
then is its current character and foundation? In the current
period, the so-called criminal justice system is largely about the
circulation of social wealth in a manner that deprives the poor
and enriches those with greater economic privilege. Indeed, as
criminologists we might well shift to organizational analysis of
self-perpetuating bureaucracies or profit-making tendencies to
accumulation within bureaucracies.

Criminal justice systems as sprawling bureaucracies are
directed, as all bureaucracies are, at self preservation and
managed growth. They tend to expand (in size and in reach). They
are redistributors of wealth upwards. They take resources from the
working classes and deploy it upwards toward the more privileged
(lawyers, judges, politicians, private capital).

But the criminal justice system serves another important
function. And that is to render any and all who might challenge
its position and privilege (and the position of the status quo it
upholds and profits from) as against the law, as illegal. Even
more, though, in the current period the system serves to make
suspect, to survey, to track and contain, to criminalize, and to
warn even those who do not oppose. These become the common
characteristics of everyday life within liberal democracies (which
are rendered perhaps post-liberal non-democracies).

Critical theorists such as Jeff Reiman have incisively shown
that criminal justice systems in capitalist liberal democracies
are not designed to deliver justice. Reiman has shown instead that
the system works rather to shift attention away from the social
harms of elites and to focus on the crimes of the working classes.
This reinforces a narrative that describes social harm as coming
from non-elites-the so-called dangerous classes to be feared and
regulated.

Yet this approach is incomplete and does not go far enough. The
issue today that criminology must contend with is that the
criminal justice system is not maintained by a focus on actual
crime (whether working class or not). And the system, in its
surveillance functions especially, is directed at a generalized non-criminality.
This is a key transformation.

We are all illegal now. We are all criminals, resources to be
mined and manipulated to fulfill the self-perpetuating drives of
accumulating systems. And, what is really in play, we are all
potential media of exchange for systems designed fundamentally to
accumulate capital and redistribute resources (from bottom to top)
in a self-aggrandizing fashion. But we must be converted to the
proper currency and the new criminalizing practices achieve this.

In this context we must give up all claims to be objective,
neutral analysts (while blithely deluding ourselves that what we
study, as a criminal justice system, actually exists). If those
threatened with or subjected to repression, surveillance,
criminalization, and/or state violence are portrayed as-and
treated as-insurgents (as threats to the systemic status quo) then
criminologists, as those who are supposed to understand the
workings of these systems, have a responsibility to stand with the
insurgents against the forces of criminalization. We must be
insurgents ourselves. Criminology must, in recognizing and
honestly naming, systems of repression must also be an insurgent
practice.

Our criminology must be an insurgent criminology. That is, it
must be a criminology in and of active struggles, active revolt,
against states, and capital, and their criminal justice systems; a
criminology that rises against, that seeks to abolish instituted
authorities.